I'm sick of this sort of crummy linkbait. The exact same thing crops up every few months on HN. "Ideas are a dime a dozen! Engineering is the one true way! Exec

I'm sick of this sort of crummy linkbait. The exact same thing crops up every few months on HN. "Ideas are a dime a dozen! Engineering is the one true way! Execution is paramount! Reddit, here's a picture of my cute cat!" It's not black and white (the cat, or the matter in hand here). As a community, we all nurture fragile ideas. Some of them are big, bold ideas (like beating Google at search), but almost all of them are very fragile. People shouldn't labour on in delusion, but if you say the wrong thing to the wrong dispirited guy who has been thinking about a brilliant idea for three months, then you're going to harm rather than help. And you can help without investing your asshole consulting time. Nobody needs more assholes reflecting on their status within the startup landscape ("I'm a scarce resource") and denigrating people who presumably are coming to you to share ideas they're excited about ("available markers" – whatever that means – "and business monkeys"), whilst simultaneously insinuating that the work engineers do is somehow more vital or worthy ("I have [to] make an investment and [do] actual work while you played [sic] around with excel spreadsheets and send [sic] out a few press releases?"). Engineering is vitally important. But that alone does not encompass execution. An MVP (or a P) is the sum total of the amount of sheer thought that has gone into it from everyone who has worked on it or cares about it. Your asshole consulting code doesn't mean anything if it's a feature which nobody needs. A great software engineer contributes code and creative ideas which push a project on. A non-technical co-founder should protect their engineering team and contribute creative ideas which push a project on, whilst doing the grunt work required to push the project on (pay your taxes. Find an office. Do an angel raise. All the crappy ephemeral stuff that goes with a new startup). But most importantly they are there to care and nurture fragile ideas. The thing which I sincerely loved about this article was the last paragraph. And it's probably a charge which could be leveraged at this comment, but you should have reconsidered your entire post around the final paragraph. Instead of making it a polemic against curious people with ideas who want to share them with you, and telling them just why you're not interested in working with anyone ever, you should have helped people be more persuasive with those ideas in talking to highly technically literate individuals. Yes, there are countless people who believe they have ideas which can change the world. Yes, there are fewer engineers who can help them get there. What these ideas people need is someone who is prepared to help them realise they are at step 1 of 1.5m, and the most critical thing to do right now is get to step 2. That takes five seconds. It takes a pertinent question. It takes making them stop and think for a second. It doesn't take a list of vaguely offensive barbs and generalisations. Context: I am a semi-technically literate cofounder (HTML/CSS/JS, competent PHP).